So did knowing which blocks to avoid after sunset, which dealers would ignore a starving kid in their bins, and which shouts in the alleyways meant nothing more than another drunken fight that would burn itself out on its own. Other shouts meant blood. Those, he learned to run from.

Bravery didn’t keep anyone alive in Crime Alley. Timing did.

That was why you made no sense to him.

You should have known better than to interfere. Everybody did. You were old enough to know how Gotham worked, old enough to understand that stepping between violence and the people it wanted usually only meant getting hit first.

But you did it anyway.

Not because you were fearless. Jason knew what fear looked like. He’d seen your hands shake after fights you barely won, watched you rinse blood from your knuckles in the sink of a gas station bathroom, jaw set tight while younger kids hovered nearby pretending not to stare.

You were afraid plenty.

You just never seemed willing to let fear make your choices for you.

At twelve, Jason had thought you looked half-grown and indestructible.

Looking back, he understood you were neither.

You were only a two or three years older than him, all sharp bones and stubborn posture, with the rangy build every underfed Gotham kid seemed to end up with. Adults still towered over you. Older teens could still throw their weight around with you if they wanted. There was nothing about you that should have made anyone in the Alley think twice.

And yet they did.

Because if someone smaller got cornered, you stepped in.

If a kid got their food stolen, you split yours.

If someone cried, you stayed.

You couldn’t stop everything. You couldn’t stop the disappearances, the beatings, the cold nights, the empty stomachs, or the way the Alley swallowed kids whole and kept going like nothing had happened.

But you tried.

Jason had never understood why.

He met you behind a convenience store with somebody’s filthy hand twisted in the front of his shirt.

One second he’d been digging through the bins, sorting through wet cardboard and spoiled food for anything salvageable. The next he was yanked off the ground hard enough to make his teeth click together.

The man smelled like stale beer, piss, and general old stank.

"Thieving little bastard," he slurred, spit hitting Jason’s cheek. "Think I don’t see you?"

Jason kicked hard, shoes scraping uselessly through the air. Panic struck fast and hot, filling his throat until breathing hurt. He’d been grabbed before. He knew how this would g. Bad. Fast.

Nobody was coming.

Then metal cracked against bone.

The man swore and dropped him.

Jason hit the pavement hard, palms scraping on gravel.

"Run!"

Your voice.

He barely saw you at first. Just the rusted length of pipe in your hands and the wild, furious look on your face as you planted yourself between him and a grown man twice your size. You’d hit his shoulder hard enough to stagger him, but not hard enough to keep him down for long.

Jason ran.

He ran because he knew how to survive, because you’d shouted it, because staying would be stupid.

He made it halfway down the block before he realised he couldn’t hear your footsteps behind him.

He kept going for three more strides.

Then he stopped.

Every instinct he had screamed at him not to turn around. Survival had rules, and one of the biggest was simple: if somebody bought you a chance to escape, you took it and you didn’t look back.

Jason broke that rule anyway.

When he crept back behind the shop, the man was gone.

You were sitting on the ground with your back to the brick wall, one eye swelling, blood working its way down from a split lip in a thin line. The rusty pipe lay a few feet from your hand. You were staring at the pavement like if you concentrated hard enough, the pain might become somebody else’s problem.

Your head lifted when you heard him.

For a second, you just looked at him.

Then your expression changed. Surprise first, then something softer and more disbelieving.

"..You came back?"

Jason frowned like the question itself was stupid. "You got left behind."

You stared at him a beat longer.

Then you laughed once, short and broken off by a hiss when it pulled at your mouth.

"Yeah," you muttered. "Guess I did."

That should have been the end of it.

Instead, Jason started looking for you.

Not because you were the strongest kid in the Alley. You weren’t.

Not because you won every fight. He saw pretty quickly that you didn’t. Most times, stepping in just meant you walked away with another bruise blooming under your skin, another split knuckle, another limp you tried to hide from the younger ones.

But you kept doing it.

You kept choosing people.

He never figured out how to make sense of that.

He only knew the Alley felt different when you were close.

Not safer, exactly. Crime Alley didn’t become safe just because one stubborn kid with a bad temper and a worse savior complex was nearby.

But it felt less final. Like the world had missed a spot. Like maybe it hadn’t finished swallowing the two of you yet.

Without ever meaning to, you had become the standard Jason measured everyone else against.

Bruce had expected resistance.

He had expected suspicion, anger, hell even a bolt for the nearest unlocked door. Jason had survived by trusting no one, and Wayne Manor, with its polished floors, its cavernous ceilings, was the sort of place a boy like him would sooner flinch from than accept.

What Bruce had not expected was for Jason to stop in the middle of the foyer and refuse to move another inch.

The front doors were still open behind them, breathing cold night air into the warm gold of the entrance hall. Alfred had gone still near the staircase, wise enough not to interrupt whatever fragile thing was happening. Bruce turned back just in time to see Jason tighten both hands around the straps of his backpack hard enough to whiten his knuckles.

The boy’s boyish blue eyes were bubbling up with tears.

He was staring past Bruce, past Alfred, straight through the open doors.

Bruce followed his gaze and found you standing at the bottom of the steps.

You had not come in.

Of course you hadn’t.

You stood with your shoulders hunched, as though trying to make yourself smaller against the sheer size of the manor. The porch light caught on the frayed cuffs of your sleeves, the worn toes of your shoes, the fading marks on your jaw and throat that no child your age should have known how to carry so casually. You looked like someone already preparing to be left behind with dignity.

Bruce felt the shape of the problem at once.

“You’ll still see them,” he said carefully.

Jason did not look at him.

“They’re not coming in.”

Bruce kept his voice even. “That doesn’t mean you won’t stay friends.”

Jason’s jaw set. “No.”

“You can visit. They can visit. Nothing has to end tonight.”

“No.”

There was no petulance in it. No ordinary childish refusal. Every answer came out low and hard, like something dragged up from much deeper than anger.

Bruce watched the boy for a long moment.

Jason’s breathing had gone shallow fast. There was grief in the room already, absurd and premature, as if he had only just been handed a future and was already bracing for it to take something from him.

“Jason,” Bruce said quietly. “Tell me what you want.”

Only then did Jason tear his eyes away from you long enough to glare at him.

The answer came like it was obvious.

“They come too.”

Silence.

Bruce looked back outside.

You had taken half a step away already. Leaving before anyone had to tell you there was no space for you here.

He could tell you didn’t want to. But, in your mind, Jason had been chosen.

You hadn’t.

And Bruce understood, with sudden uncomfortable clarity, that if he let that happen, Jason would never forgive him for it.

Not later. Not ever.

Alfred cleared his throat softly.

“Master Bruce,” he said, “I believe the young master has made his wishes rather clear.”

Bruce exhaled through his nose.

Then, he called, “Would you come inside for a moment?”

You looked over your shoulder.

A ridiculous reflex, really. As if there might be someone else on the steps. As if a place like this could not possibly be asking for you.

Jason made an impatient sound and flung one hand in your direction.

You looked at him first.

Only after that did you come.

Slowly. Carefully. Like a stray coaxed toward a doorway it had no reason to trust.

You crossed the threshold and stopped immediately, feet close together on the polished floor, hands shoved deep into your pockets. You’d reeled your pheromones in quickly.

Bruce saw the way your eyes flicked over everything without resting anywhere long. Chandeliers. Marble. Staircase. Paintings. Wealth enough to feed whole neighborhoods, gathered under one roof and lit warm enough to make it seem kind.

You did not touch a thing.

Bruce had seen that before too.

Children who grew up with nothing often learned to move through beautiful places as if beauty itself were breakable, and they would be blamed if it cracked.

He crouched so he would not tower over you.

Up close, the details sharpened. Old bruises. New bruises. A split at one knuckle. Exhaustion hidden beneath sheer stubbornness.

“If Jason would feel more comfortable with you here,” Bruce said, choosing each word with care, “then I would like to speak with you about staying as well.”

For a second, you only stared.

“Me?” The disbelief in your voice was quiet enough to hurt.

Bruce nodded once. “If you want that.”

Your head turned so quickly it was almost painful to watch, eyes going wide as they landed on Jason.

Jason was already smiling.

It changed his whole face.

Not the sharp little smirk Bruce had seen in the car, not the wary, defensive thing he wore like armor. This was open. Bright. A child’s expression, sudden and unguarded and so full of relief that Bruce felt something in his chest go tight.

It was the first time Jason had looked happy since Bruce had met him.

And it was because of you.

So you remained.

Your clothes began appearing in drawers instead of laundry baskets. A second toothbrush appeared in one of the upstairs bathrooms when Alfred informed you, with measured horror, that of course you should have your own. School uniforms were tailored. Shoes replaced. Bruises treated before they could fade into old ones.

Dick adored you almost instantly, which was unfortunate for everyone involved, because Dick adored loudly.

He inserted himself into your orbit with the natural confidence of someone who had never once doubted he belonged where he stood, and before long he had taken to dragging both you and Jason through the manor in search of hidden staircases, disused rooms, and places Alfred absolutely did not want children climbing on.

You humored him with an ease Jason found suspicious.

Jason tolerated him because you did. That was as generous as he ever got about it.

He got used to the manor in ways that made Bruce hopeful and uneasy all at once. He learned the rhythms of the house quickly. Learned where the floorboards sang beneath careless feet and where the sunlight landed best in winter. Learned how to sleep through thunderstorms beneath a roof that did not leak.

And, more than any of that, he learned where to find you.

In the library, cross-legged on the rug with a book half-open in your lap.

In the gym, sweating through drills while Bruce corrected your stance and Dick offered commentary nobody had asked for.

On the east balcony after nightmares, face turned toward the dark grounds beyond the gardens as if habit still expected danger to come from open space.

Wherever you were, Jason’s body seemed to know it before the rest of him did.

At first, Bruce thought very little of it. It was not unhealthy. Not yet. Jason had spent too long surviving alone. There were worse things than attachment.

But attachment, Bruce learned, was too small a word for what formed between the two of you.

It showed itself in strange, quiet ways.

Jason could be laughing with Dick one moment and looking toward the door the next, distracted by some shift Bruce could not track until you entered the room and Jason settled without seeming aware he had gone taut in the first place.

If dinner ran late and you had not come down yet, Jason lingered instead of eating.

If you were sent on an errand with Alfred or kept behind after a lesson, he became brittle around the edges. Sharper. Easier to provoke.

Jason lasted nineteen minutes before throwing his escrima stick across the mat.

Dick blinked. “Okay, wow. Dramatic.”

“I’m not being dramatic.”

Bruce folded his arms. “Then what are you being?”

Jason did not answer.

He stood with his shoulders tight and his mouth drawn thin, furious with Bruce and clearly angrier that he could not explain why.

The gym doors opened.

You stepped in, late from another lesson, apology already on your tongue.

Jason visibly relaxed.

It happened so quickly Bruce might have missed it if he had not already been watching for patterns. The stiffness bled out of him. His breathing evened. The violence in his posture simply... vanished.

Dick looked between the two of you, brow furrowing.

Bruce said nothing.

But afterwards, he began adjusting schedules.

Jason trained better with you there.

That was true in every measurable sense. He listened longer. Focused harder. Recovered from frustration faster. Even his temper, so quick to flare under criticism, seemed steadier when you were close enough to brush shoulders with in passing.

He learned your movements along with his own.

And you, without realising it, learned him just as thoroughly.

A hand at the nape of his neck when his breathing went wrong after sparring. A quiet nudge of your knee against his under the dinner table when Dick needled him too far. Your voice, low and familiar, cutting through the noise in his head before it built into something ugly.

You steadied him.

More dangerously, Jason was beginning to understand that you could.

It was Alfred who noticed the presentation first.

An old shirt of yours vanishing from the laundry and turning up two days later under Jason’s pillow.

Blankets smelling faintly of him in places he had no business sleeping.

The armchair in the library, the window seat in the second-floor hall, the corner of the couch where he liked to wedge himself beside you, all carrying that soft, newly-developing trace of omega scent that was behind in places his instincts had claimed safe.

Bruce had not noticed.

Alfred had.

“He has began presenting.” Alfred said one evening over tea.

Bruce looked up from the file in his hands. “He’s already scenting? Where?”

Alfred’s expression was both fond and deeply telling.

“Primarily,” he said, “wherever they are.”

Bruce leaned back in his chair. That explained more than he wanted it to.

By then Jason had started borrowing your things shamelessly. Jackets. Hoodies. A scarf once, though he denied it until Dick found him asleep with it looped around one wrist like it had wandered there on its own.

He gravitated toward you naturally, and you, probably from habit, made space.

As an alpha, you should have clocked the changes before Jason did.

The shift in his scent. The instinctive seeking. The way his body had begun orienting itself around you with a devotion it did not yet have language for.

But you never pushed him away. Didn’t laugh or force distance when his instincts asked for closeness.

Bruce wondered if you understood more than you let on.

Alfred, predictably, understood everything. “I suspect Master Jason has already decided where his pack lies.”

Bruce’s gaze drifted towards the study window.

For Jason’s sake, he only hoped that instinct would never have reason to change.

Jason’s first heat broke over him like a fever dream.

One moment he had been sitting on the floor of the sitting room, pretending to read while actually listening to the older two argue over patrol routes. The next every sound in the manor was too sharp. The clock too loud. Dick’s laugh unbearable. Even the collar of his own shirt felt wrong against his skin.

He stood too quickly.

Dick looked up. “Jay?”

“Don’t.”

The word came out clipped. Breathless.

Bruce was already moving, all attention sharpening at once. “Jason.”

“I said don’t.”

He didn’t know what was happening.

His skin felt too tight. His thoughts all jumbled up and cloudy. Every unfamiliar scent scratching at his nerves, and beneath all of it was a crawling, awful ache for something he could not name.

He made it halfway upstairs before panic took him properly.

By the time Bruce and Dick reached his room, it was empty.

They found him eventually in yours.

Not in your bed.

In your closet, curled into a miserable knot between clothes, clutching one of your hoodies to his chest so tightly his hands had twisted in the fabric. His cheeks were wet. His eyes feral.

Bruce stopped in the doorway. “Jason..?”

“Fuck off.”

“We’re trying to help.”

“No.”

There was no reasoning with that tone.

Bruce lowered his voice. “Would it help if we called them home?”

Jason’s answer broke out of him so quickly that he hadn’t even waited for Bruce to finish the thought.

“Yes.”

You were home in less than twenty minutes.

Bruce met you in the hall. “He’s in your room.”

Your expression changed fast. Alarm, understanding, then something softer.

Bruce remained near the door.

From where he stood, he could see the exact moment Jason realised it was you.

The air changed before Jason did. The moment your scent reached him, something frantic in the room seemed to recoil and loosen all at once. His shoulders shook with one sharp breath. Then another. His grip on the hoodie slackened.

You crouched in front of the wardrobe and spoke his name like you had all the time in the world.

No urgency. No pity. No fear.

Jason looked at you as if he had been drowning.

“Hey,” you murmured.

His face crumpled with mortification almost immediately after relief.

“Sorry.”

Your brows furrowed. “For what?”

“I don’t know what’s happening.”

There was a crack in his voice now, small and young enough that Bruce had to look away for a moment.

You did not.

“There’s nothing wrong with you,” you said.

Then you sat on the floor and leaned against the side of the wardrobe, close enough for him to reach out if he needed.

Jason stared for two long seconds.

Then, while trembling, he moved.

Like an animal approaching warmth after too long in winter. He folded into your side and went still the moment you let him.

Bruce had never seen an omega in heat settle so fast.

The panic did not vanish entirely, but it softened. Jason’s breathing steadied against your shoulder. His fingers loosened. The wildness left his eyes as your hand rose to the back of his head and stayed there.

From that point on, Jason’s instincts did not merely prefer you. They arranged themselves around you.

He slept easier if he had one of your sweatshirts. He calmed faster after nightmares if you were the one who found him.

He grew territorial. Drifting closer when strangers stood too near, bristling when others, omegas and alphas alike, touched you too casually.

He did not know yet that devotion could become hunger.

Only that the shape of his peace had become embarrassingly, helplessly, yours.

And because he was still young, because the manor was warm and you were always there and the world had not yet taught him what it would cost to lose you, he let himself believe that was enough.

And for a while, it was.

The first time Jason kissed you, he was fourteen and furious about it.

Not with you.

Mostly with himself.

A little with Dick, because he had a talent for making everything worse merely by existing nearby.

It happened in the cave after patrol.

Bruce had gone to change. Dick had been talking a mile a minute about some acrobatic move he swore Jason had nearly ruined by not trusting his timing. Jason had called him insufferable. Dick, of course, had preened under it.

Then Dick had thrown an arm around your shoulders. Casual. Mindless. The kind of easy touch Dick gave everyone he loved without thinking.

Jason saw it and something hot and ugly flared low in his stomach. Too quick. Too sharp. Too much.

He hated how his first urge was to knock Dick’s hand away.

“Get off,” Jason snapped.

Dick blinked. “Excuse you?”

“Get off them.”

Your head turned, surprise knitting your brows. “Jay-”

Dick’s arm slipped away, but his expression shifted. Curious. Then knowing in that awful older-brother way Jason wanted to punch on sight.

“Oh,” Dick said.

Jason wanted to kill him.

“Shut up.”

“I didn’t even say anything.”

“You were about to.”

Dick’s grin turned bright and dangerous. “Was I?”

Jason took a step forward.

Bruce appeared from the corridor at exactly the right moment to prevent a fight and exactly the wrong one to spare Jason his dignity.

“What is going on?”

“Nothing,” Jason said flatly.

“Jason’s in a mood,” Dick supplied, cheerful as a knife wound.

Jason looked at you, expecting amusement.

You were not laughing.

You were watching him.

He muttered something rude under his breath and stormed out before anyone could stop him.

He ended up on the east balcony.

Gotham spread below in wet black glitter, all streetlamps and distant sirens and the low hum of a city too ugly to sleep gracefully. Jason braced his hands on the stone rail and tried to breathe through the storm in his head.

It should not have mattered.

Dick touched everyone. You had known Dick longer than Jason had. You sparred with him, laughed with him, leaned on him after hard patrols with the easy trust of family. Jason knew that. None of it was new.

So why had it felt like a threat?

Why had his chest gone tight enough to hurt?

Why had he wanted, so suddenly and viciously, to drag you away where no one else could touch you at all?

The answer came to him in pieces he did not want.

Because you were his.

His first thought in the morning. His refuge. His temper’s leash. His safest place. The person his body looked for before his mind had even caught up.

“Oh.”

He heard the balcony door slide open.

Of course it was you.

He knew your footsteps too well by now. Knew the exact sound your boots made against stone, the pause before you spoke when you were deciding how hard to push him.

You stopped beside him instead of in front of him. Good. He did not think he could have handled your face straight on just then.

“Dick says you want to murder him.”

“I do.”

You hummed, not sounding especially alarmed.

Jason scrubbed a hand over his face.

You let him come apart at his own pace. He had always loved you for that, though perhaps love had become too small and fragile a word for what this was growing into.

When you finally spoke again, your voice was soft. “You want to tell me what happened?”

No.

Yes.

Maybe.

Jason stared out at Gotham and said, “I don’t know.”

You leaned your elbows on the railing beside him. Your shoulder almost touched his.

“That’s not usually true.”

He huffed a humorless laugh.

For a while, neither of you moved. The wind stirred your hair. Somewhere far below, a car horn blared and was swallowed by distance.

Then Jason said, before he could lose his nerve, “When he touched you, I wanted to break his wrist.”

You went very still.

Jason forced himself to keep going. “I know that sounds insane.”

“It sounds jealous.”

He turned his head sharply.

You were still looking out over the city. Calm. Thoughtful. As if the word had not detonated his whole nervous system.

Jason’s ears burned. “I’m not jealous.”

You glanced at him then, one eyebrow lifting.

He glared. “Don’t.”

A small smile tugged at your mouth. Not mean. Somehow that made it worse. “Jason.”

“Don’t,” he said again, but there was no heat in it now, only embarrassment stripped thin.

“Do you want to know something?”

He should have said no.

Instead he muttered, “what.”

“I would have been surprised if it took you longer to figure out.”

Jason stared. The city seemed to drop away beneath him.

“What?”

You turned to face him fully now, leaning one hip against the stone rail. There was no mockery in your expression. No pity either. Just a strange, quiet fondness that made his pulse trip over itself.

“You’ve been following me around like I hung the moon for years,” you said. “You scent half the things I own. You glare at anyone who stands too close. Last month you nearly started a fight with one of the Titans because he hugged me hello.”

“He smelled weird.”

That made you laugh.

Jason might have died on the spot.

He loved your laugh. He had always loved your laugh. But right then it felt lethal.

His throat tightened. “You knew?”

“Jay.” Your voice gentled. “I know you.”

Something in him went raw at that.

Because you did.

You knew where he hid when he was angry and where he curled up when he was hurt. You knew the exact tone his voice took before a nightmare and how to keep him from spiralling after patrols that went bad. You knew him better than anyone alive.

And you were still here.

“If I kissed you,” he said, each word deliberate and low, “would you stop me?”

You looked startled. Surprised by the directness of it.

Jason’s heart slammed hard against his ribs. He had not meant to say it like that. Or maybe he had, and some more honest, more instinctive part of him had finally won the fight.

You did not answer immediately.

Then you lifted one hand and touched the side of his face.

The world narrowed to that point of contact.

“No,” you said.

Jason kissed you before you could finish.

It was not graceful.

It was sudden, too hungry, and full of things he had been swallowing for far too long. His hand caught at your wrist, then your jacket, then settled clumsily at your waist as if unsure whether to hold or anchor or keep you from disappearing. He was trembling by the time your mouth softened beneath his.

You kissed him back.

God.

You kissed him back.

The sound he made was humiliating and helpless and entirely out of his control.

When he pulled away, it was only far enough to breathe.

You stayed close.

So close your forehead nearly brushed his.

Jason stared at you, wide-eyed and wrecked.

You looked dazed.

That pleased something ugly and possessive inside him more than it should have.

“Okay,” you murmured after a moment.

“Okay?” he echoed, offended on reflex because he did not know what else to do with all the feeling climbing up his throat.

Your mouth twitched. “Yes, okay.”

“That’s all you have to say?”

You reached up and smoothed one thumb beneath his eye. Jason had not even realised he was tearing up until then.

“No,” you said quietly. “But I think if I start talking right now, you’re going to bolt.”

“I’m not bolting.”

“You literally ran here.”

He opened his mouth. Closed it.

You smiled, small and devastating. Then you kissed him again, brief this time, but oh so tender.

Jason felt it all the way down to his bones.

Jason wanted more.

Your attention first when you entered a room. His messages answered before anyone else’s. Your scent on his clothes, his sheets, his skin. Your time. Your mouth. Your loyalty.

A future so tightly braided with his that the thought of anyone trying to pull it apart would seem laughable.

He did not know yet how dangerous that kind of wanting could become. He only knew that every time you kissed him, the hunger eased for a few precious hours before returning worse than before.

And every time you touched him like he was something beloved, his instincts learned a little more certainty.

Mine, they whispered.

Mine.

He was still young enough then to be frightened by that voice.

Because fear meant that there was still a line he did not want to cross.

Jason Peter Todd-Wayne died at fifteen.

For three days, nobody had the courage to open his door.

It stayed shut at the end of the hall, white-painted and ordinary, as if there were any world in which something ordinary could still be waiting behind it.

The house was too quiet.

Not the good kind. Not the soft, restful quiet Wayne Manor sometimes fell into in the early hours, when the grandfather clock in the foyer and the wind in the trees were the only sounds left. This was a wrong kind of silence. A strained one. Like the whole house had gone still around a wound.

Bruce had not slept.

You knew because every time he came back up from the cave he smelled less and less like himself.

The clean cedar and expensive cologne he wore for galas had long since been overtaken by cave-damp, machine oil, old blood, and the bitter edge of the leader of the pack running on too little sleep and too much guilt. It clung to him when he crossed the breakfast room without eating. Sat down at the table and never touched the coffee Alfred poured. Stood in doorways as if he had forgotten what he meant to do when he got there.

He had not said Jason’s name out loud once.

Neither had you.

There were some words that became impossible the second they turned true.

On the fourth morning, Alfred opened the door.

You had not meant to be there for it.

Your feet had carried you down that hallway without permission, stopping a little short of the room you had spent years walking into without knocking.

Alfred stood in front of the door for a long moment with one hand on the knob.

He did not look at you when he said, gently, “You needn’t do this, if you’d rather not.”

You should have said no. Instead, you heard yourself answer, “If I don’t go in now, I won’t.”

Alfred’s hand tightened once. Then he turned the knob. The room still smelled like Jason.

You forgot to breathe.

It was not strong. Not fresh. Nothing so cruel as that. Just there. Folded into the blankets, caught in the curtains, buried in the clothes slung over the desk chair. Soap, leather, clean cotton, the lingering sweetness that had always lived under Jason’s skin no matter how much sweat or rain or Gotham grime tried to cover it.

Home, your body said at once.

Your mind followed too slowly.

There was a bed with one corner of the comforter hanging loose where he had left it. A book face-down on the desk. One boot by the wardrobe, toppled on its side. A hoodie half-falling out of the laundry basket because he had never once in his life put things away properly.

You made it all the way to the bed before your legs stopped working.

You sat because if you did not sit, you were going to end up on the floor.

The mattress dipped under your weight, and that was somehow what finally made you break.

Not the smell. Not the room. Not the sight of the stupid book with a page he was never going to finish.

It was the ordinary intimacy of the bed giving beneath you like it recognised you.

Like if you waited long enough, he might come in toweling his hair dry after a shower and say your name in that rough, impatient voice of his.

Your throat closed so fast it hurt.

Alfred said something, your name, maybe. But it blurred at the edges.

You reached for the pillow without thinking.

The scent on it was fainter than the room, but warmer somehow. Closer. The last place his face had rested, maybe. The last place he had drooled in his sleep and denied it the next morning. The last place he had curled up after patrol, all jangly limbs and half-healed bruises, clutching one of your sweatshirts in a fist like he thought no one noticed.

Your body leaned into it before your mind could stop you.

That did it.

Grief did not come neatly. It tore.

One second you were sitting very straight, trying not to make a sound. The next your forehead was pressed into the pillow and your whole chest was caving in around a noise you did not recognise as yours until it would not stop. Tears soaked into the case. Your shoulders shook so hard your teeth clicked together. You tried to muffle it because Alfred was still there, because some ugly pride in you could not bear to be witnessed like this, but grief did not care what dignity you had left.

Jason still smelled like safety.

That was the part that made it unbearable.

Some deep animal part of you did not understand death. It understood absence, yes. Distance. Hurt. But not this. Not gone in any final sense.

Your instincts kept reaching for him inside the scent, trying to find the living thing attached to it. Your body was readying to soothe, to gather, to pull him close and check him over and make sure he was still breathing.

There was nobody there.

Only the smell of an omega who had once belonged to you so completely.

A hand settled between your shoulders.

Alfred.

He did not hush you. Did not say it would pass. Did not offer the kind of comfort people gave when they wanted your grief smaller and easier to look at.

He only stayed.

You cried until it left you shaky and emptied-out and raw.

When you finally lifted your head, there was a damp patch on the pillowcase and a smear of blood where your teeth had broken skin somewhere inside your mouth. Your face felt hot. Your hands would not stop trembling.

“I’m sorry,” you said, because it fell out on instinct.

Alfred looked at you in open pain.

“For what, my dear?”

You had no answer.

For not saving him.

For loving him.

For still breathing when he wasn’t.

For the way part of you had, in the first insane second after the door opened, expected him to be here.

You looked away.

Alfred squeezed your shoulder once before he crossed the room and opened the window a fraction. Just enough for the cold to slip in.

Not to erase Jason.

Just to make breathing possible again.

Dick found out from the newspaper.

Bruce had wanted to tell him himself. You knew that much. He had been waiting for the right hour, the right flight home, the right way to put words around something that would wreck the boy on the other end of the line no matter how gently it was done.

Gotham did not wait for right.

The phone rang after midnight.

You were still awake. Sleep had turned slippery these last few nights, never staying long enough to matter. Alfred had gone to bed because there was nothing else he could do. Bruce was underground.

You picked up on the second ring.

“Tell me it’s bullshit.”

Dick.

No hello. No breath between the words. Just Dick’s voice gone thin and ragged and wrong in a way that made something in your spine go cold.

You sat down without remembering to.

The little table in the hall pressed hard against your knee. Somewhere downstairs, the grandfather clock ticked on, indifferent.

“Dick-” “Tell me they got it wrong.”

Your mouth opened. Nothing came out.

On the other end of the line, Dick made a sound like he had been hit.

A low, strangled noise dragged out of somewhere deep enough that it barely sounded human. The line crackled. There was a crash, then another. Maybe he had thrown something. Maybe he had dropped. You did not know.

“I was supposed to be back next week,” he said.

The words were shredded. Half breath, half denial.

“I know.”

“I told him I’d be back next week.”

You pressed your free hand so hard against your mouth it hurt.

“I know.”

Silence.

Then, very quietly, like he was confessing to something filthy:

“I left him here.”

Your eyes burned. “No.”

“Yes.”

“No,” you said again, and this time it came out sharp. “Don’t do that.”

But he was not listening anymore.

Or maybe he was and simply could not follow you into a world where this was survivable.

He started breathing too fast. You could hear it. Hear him trying and failing to get enough air into his lungs through whatever had split him open. You shut your eyes and pictured him somewhere strange and far from home, hotel lamp on its side, newspaper spread open, the whole room stinking of panic and guilt.

“I should’ve been there.”

You had nothing that could touch that.

Nothing that could fix what distance had made possible.

So you stayed on the line while he broke.

You did not know how long. Ten minutes. Forty. Three hours. Time had become slippery too. At some point his breathing calmed enough to sound like a person again, though only barely. At some point Bruce came up from the cave and stopped dead when he saw you on the floor with the phone still pressed to your ear.

You looked at him.

Bruce knew at once.

His eyes closed for a second. Then he held out his hand for the receiver.

Dick must have realised who it was from the change in your breathing, because the moment Bruce got the phone to his ear, Dick spoke first.

“How long were you going to wait?”

Bruce did not answer quickly enough.

That, more than anything, told you how bad the conversation on the other end was about to become.

You stood up and walked away before you had to hear it.

Dick came home smelling sour.

The front door had barely shut behind him before you knew he was here. It hit first. Stale recycled air, rain caught in fabric, the sharp chemical edge of suppressants burned through too quickly, then underneath it all the hot, ugly scent of an alpha running so close to feral on guilt that the whole house seemed to tense around him.

You were halfway down the stairs when he stepped into the foyer.

For a second, neither of you moved.

Dick looked wrecked.

There were shadows under his eyes so deep they changed the shape of his face. His hair was flattened strangely on one side like he had slept against an airplane window and never really woken up. His duffel hung from one hand, forgotten.

His gaze found you and stayed there.

Then he crossed the room in three fast strides and folded into you so hard you staggered.

You caught him because of course you did.

Dick had always hugged like he meant it. Arms everywhere, too warm, all heart and momentum. This was different. This was a collapse disguised as contact. He bent over you like if he let go for even a second he might crack apart completely.

“I left him,” he said into your shoulder. His voice broke on the last word.

You tightened your arms around him. “No.”

“I did.”

“No, Dick.”

He made a wrecked sound and clutched harder at the back of your shirt. His scent was bleeding off him by then, hot and wild. His grief had teeth. You could smell it spiking in the air, bitter and sharp enough that your own body answered before your mind did. Shoulders tightening, pulse jumping, every old alpha instinct waking up to the distress of pack.

You guided him down before his knees gave out.

The two of you hit the foyer rug in a graceless tangle.

Dick didn’t seem to notice.

He was crying now, properly crying, face turned into your shoulder, fingers knotted in your shirt like he needed something solid under his hands and you had been the nearest thing. He was bigger than he used to be. Broader. Heavier. But grief made everyone young again. You could feel it in him, that old terrible helplessness stripped bare.

“I wasn’t here,” he kept saying.

You stroked a hand over the back of his head because there was nothing else to do.

Above you, the staircase stayed empty.

No Jason sitting halfway up with his chin in his hand, making some awful joke to cut the tension. No sharp voice telling Dick to quit being dramatic. No annoyed eye-roll before he inevitably came down and pressed into the side of the pile anyway because for all his complaints, he had always hated being left out of affection.

The silence where he should have been was a living thing.

Bruce stopped in the doorway.

Dick must have heard him. Or smelled him. His shoulders went rigid.

Slowly, Dick lifted his head.

You felt the moment something dangerous passed through him.

Not hatred.

Something worse. Something he would hate himself for later.

Blame.

It flashed hot and acrid through his scent before he managed to drag it back under control. Bruce took it without moving. Without defending himself. Maybe because he agreed. Maybe because he had not slept in days and no longer had the strength to lie about who he thought had failed.

No one spoke.

Dick looked away first.

Bruce turned and left.

That was worse than if he’d stayed.

After that, the house stopped pretending.

It no longer smelled like a home. Not really.

Even clean, even aired out, even with Alfred opening windows whenever the weather allowed, there was grief trapped in everything. Bruce’s office smelled like old paper and stress. The cave smelled metallic and mean. Dick’s room shifted by the hour. Sour suppressants, dried tears, sweat from training too hard and not enough sleep. The corridor outside Jason’s room remained the worst of it. Faded now, but still enough to make your breath catch if you came around the corner too fast.

You started changing your route through the house to avoid it.

Then you started changing your route through your own thoughts.

The kitchen hurt because Jason used to come in barefoot and half-awake, stealing toast off plates like Alfred would not see him.

The library hurt because one chair by the window still smelled faintly of him if the day was warm.

The gym hurt because you kept glancing toward the doors expecting him late, grumpy, pulling wraps over his hands with his teeth.

The cave hurt because every crackle over comms made your body sit up before your brain could remember there would never be a reply in his voice.

The body was stupid that way.

Instinct was stupid.

It kept expecting what it had known longest. Kept seeking the shape of him in passing air, in old laundry, in the echo of motorcycle engines on the drive. Sometimes you would turn too quickly because you were sure, sure, that you had caught his scent under the detergent in a stack of clean towels, only for it to vanish the second you chased it.

Each time felt like you were dying.

You lasted longer than you should have.

Partly because leaving felt like betrayal.

Partly because Bruce was unraveling in ways that frightened you. He vanished into Batman so completely that some mornings you only knew he had come home because fresh blood smelled copper-sharp in the laundry room sink and Alfred’s voice had that clipped, brittle edge it got when he was angry and trying very hard to be polite about it.

Partly because Dick had started haunting Jason’s door at night.

The first time you found him there, he was sitting on the floor with his back against the wall and one of Jason’s old sweatshirts twisted in his hands.

He looked up like he’d been caught stealing. Then his mouth twisted.

“This is pathetic.”

You sat down beside him. “It isn’t.”

“It is.”

But he pressed the sweatshirt to his face anyway.

You didn’t argue again. There was no point. Sometimes grief made fools of everybody. Sometimes that was the only honest thing left.

He breathed in once, sharp and desperate, then shut his eyes.

You looked at the door and thought: I can’t do this forever.

The thought frightened you.

It should have felt impossible. Instead it felt true.

Alfred found you packing on a Thursday afternoon.

Bruce was asleep. Dick was out. The house was so quiet you could hear birds chirping in the garden.

Your suitcase sat open on the bed.

You had not realised how little of your life here had remained purely yours until you started sorting through it. Shirts Alfred had bought because the old ones no longer fit. Books Bruce had handed you because Diana and Clark had spoken about them. Socks Dick had stolen, then returned, then stolen again. Hoodies that belonged to Jason but ended up in your room anyway because he left things everywhere and liked finding them on you later.

That one almost put you on the floor.

You folded it anyway. Put it in the suitcase. Took it back out. Sat there with it in your lap until the knock came at the door.

Alfred stepped in.

His gaze moved from your face to the suitcase to the hoodie in your hands.

“Oh,” he said softly.

You laughed because if you did not, you were going to cry again.

“Yeah.”

He came farther in.

For a while he said nothing. He only began straightening a stack of folded clothes that did not need straightening, giving you the dignity of talking first if you wanted to.

“I can’t stay,” you said at last.

Alfred nodded once. No surprise. No argument.

It hurt.

Your fingers dug into the fabric in your lap. “I keep thinking I hear him.”

Alfred went still.

“In the hall. On the stairs. Coming in from patrol.” Your voice thinned. “Sometimes I smell him and for a second I forget.”

You looked down hard, blinking at the blur in your vision. “And then I remember again.”

Alfred sat beside you on the edge of the bed. “You are not leaving him.”

You let out a broken breath.

“..Yes, I am.”

“No.” His voice was gentle, but firm in that way of his that made contradicting feel childish.

You looked at him and nearly came apart again. “I don’t know what to do with loving him if he’s gone.”

Alfred’s face changed. The old beta’s faint scent circling around you comfortingly.

“Young Master,” he said quietly, “if I knew how to answer that, I would have spared Master Bruce the question years ago.”

You made a small, broken sound that might have been a laugh.

He put an arm around your shoulders then. Formal even in comfort, somehow. You leaned into it anyway.

Bruce found the bags in the foyer that evening.

He stood in the doorway between the hall and the stairs, taking in the suitcase, the duffel, you.

“Apartment?” he asked.

You nodded.

The silence stretched.

He looked tired enough to disappear standing up. “Have you signed the lease?”

“Yes.”

Another pause.

Rain tapped against the tall windows. Somewhere deeper in the house, a clock chimed the quarter hour.

Bruce looked at the bags again, then at your face.

“I thought about asking you to stay.”

You swallowed.

He did not dress the truth up. He never had, not when it mattered.

“But it would be because I don’t want one more empty room.”

Your eyes burned. “I know.”

He looked away first, toward the dark glass of the front doors. “I keep thinking if I come upstairs quickly enough, I’ll hear him before I remember.”

You nodded because your throat had locked up.

Bruce stepped closer and pulled you into his arms.

He had hugged you before, but rarely. He was not a man who rea by instinct. Bruce’s love came in training schedules and spare helmets and making sure the lights were always on when his children came home late.

So when he held you now, broad hand braced between your shoulders, the grief in him felt enormous.

He smelled wrong.

Like exhaustion left too long on the body. Like metal and antiseptic and old adrenaline. Like a man whose instincts had nowhere to go now that the one he had failed to protect was gone.

“This is still your home,” he said.

You shut your eyes.

“I know.”

“Alfred will send food.”

A helpless sound escaped you, half laugh, half sob.

“I know.”

“He’s already packed some, hasn’t he?”

You nodded into his shoulder.

Bruce’s mouth moved, maybe toward a smile, maybe not. It didn’t hold long enough to tell.

When he let go, he kept one hand on your shoulder for a second more, as if steadying you or himself.

Neither of you said goodbye.

You were both too old, by then, to use a word that sounded so much like being left.

The apartment was small enough that your grief could not build an echo.

That was the first thing you noticed.

The second was that it smelled only like you.

Not Bruce’s stress-sour exhaustion. Not Dick’s frayed grief. Not old linen and polish and cooked dinners and rain seeping under the manor doors.

Just you.

Dust. laundry soap. the faint sharpness of the cheap lemon cleaner the last tenant had probably used on the counters.

It should have felt lonely.

Instead it felt like lowering a weight you had forgotten you were carrying.

One bedroom. One bathroom. Peeling wallpaper by the radiator. Pipes that knocked when the neighbors ran water. A kitchen too narrow to turn around in without bumping a hip against the counter.

You set Alfred’s food in the tiny fridge and sat on the floor because you did not own enough furniture yet.

The room held.

No ghosts waiting at the edges of your vision. No old scent trapped in cushions. No hallway outside your door where you could accidentally believe for one sick hopeful second that Jason had just come home.

You slept through the night.

When you woke, the shame of that was immediate and vicious.

But beneath it, quieter, meaner because it felt like relief, was the knowledge that you had actually rested.

You spent years there.

You still answered Bruce’s calls.

You still came when patrol needed another body.

You still showed up every third Sunday because Alfred would have tracked you down himself if you tried to miss dinner.

You’d even helped Bruce’s new kid settle in. Even when everything inside of you screamed that it was wrong. That Tim wasn’t Jason.

But when it was over, you left.

And sometime in the middle of all that, a new name started surfacing.

At first it was just something muttered over police bands. A rumor passed between henchmen. A body count attached to a mask no one knew yet.

Then it was everywhere.

Red Hood.

Dick hated him before either of you had seen him properly.

Bruce never said much when the name came up.

Robin seemed to be the only one interested.

You told yourself your unease meant nothing.

That the prickling at the back of your neck when someone said his name was just pattern-seeking, just the body finding omens where there were none.

But some nights, lying awake in your too-small apartment, you would stare at the ceiling and feel your instincts turn restless under your skin for reasons you could not name.

As if the city itself had started pacing.

As if something that had once belonged to you had put its hands against Gotham’s throat and was finally trying to find its way home.

He died afraid.

He had known fear all his life. Fear in alleyways. Fear under fists. Fear in the split second before a body hit pavement hard enough to maybe not get back up. He knew what it was to be hunted, cornered, hurt.

But this was different.

This was the kind of fear that made his body remember what it was before it remembered who it was. Prey, young, trapped, omega, with nowhere to run and nobody getting to him fast enough.

The warehouse stank.

Oil. mold. rat shit. old blood. chemical cleaner trying and failing to cover rot. Under all of it was the Joker, sweet and spoiled and wrong, the omega’s scent so sharply unbalanced it turned Jason’s stomach every time the man leaned close enough to breathe.

His own blood was everywhere.

He could smell it thick on the concrete, soaked into his shirt, drying tacky at the corner of his mouth.

He had fought until he couldn’t. Then he had fought after that too. It had changed nothing.

Every hit had driven the room deeper into unreality. The crowbar had made a different sound against bone than Jason would have thought. Wetter. Duller. Like meat struck on a butcher’s block. He would remember that too, in flashes.

The worst part was what his body did. Every instinct he had spent years learning to master came apart under pain. His scent had gone wild.

He could smell it himself through the blood and fear, sweet with distress, blown open in the room like a distress flare. Vulnerability, terror, omega, omega, omega. Every part of him advertising hurt in a world that devoured the hurt first. He hated it. Hated the humiliation of it almost as much as the pain. Hated that his body was begging in a language it could not stop speaking.

The Joker loved it. “Oh, Batsy’s little bird is scared now, isn’t he?”

Jason spat blood at his shoes. The Joker only laughed.

At some point the rope around Jason’s wrists had come loose enough for him to wrench one hand half-free. He got the shard of glass. He got one good cut in. He got hope for maybe three seconds before the beating that followed taught him not to mistake desperation for victory.

After that, everything narrowed.

Noise blurred. Light bent strangely at the edges. The bomb ticked somewhere nearby with an almost polite little sound.

Joker was gone. Sheila was crying. Jason couldn’t feel his left hand.

He looked at the timer and understood, with a clarity so clean it felt holy, that Bruce was not going to make it in time.

For one mad second he thought of the Manor.

Not the cave. Not Robin. Not Batman.

Home.

The library window cracked open in spring. Alfred pretending not to notice Jason stealing food while packing him extra anyway. Dick laughing too loud somewhere down the hall. Your hands on his face after patrol, turning his head toward the light to check a cut over his brow. The smell of your room on nights his body didn’t know how to calm down until he curled into it.

You.

Always you.

He should have thought of his life. He thought of your hands.

The blast hit before he could decide whether that was pathetic.

Then there was nothing.

Death should have been quiet. Instead, it was dirt.

He came back choking.

His nails tore bloody crescents into satin first, then splintering wood, then wet-packed earth that filled his mouth when he screamed. Panic hit so hard it erased language. There was only need. Air. Up. Out. Claw. Kick. Tear.

His body moved with a violence that did not feel human.

His fingers broke. Still, he dug.

Roots caught under his nails. Mud jammed in his nose. The coffin had scraped skin from his shoulders. He did not know when he started sobbing. He only knew the sound of it, ragged, animal, high with terror.

Omega instincts, some cracked part of him thought later. Buried alive. Alone. Trapped. Every nightmare his body had ever been built to fear, all at once.

He breached the surface half-mad and vomiting mud.

Cold air hit his face.

Rain. Graveyard. Hands on him.

He lashed out before he could see.

A grunt. A curse. Someone caught his wrist.

“Easy, boy.”

Not pack. Not home. Not safe.

Jason tried to crawl backward and found his limbs barely listened. His muscles shuddered uselessly. His lungs burned. His skin felt too tight, too filthy, too wrong. He could smell wet grass and old stone and his own terror still pouring off him in humiliating waves.

Then came the pit.

Later, he would try to remember if anyone had explained it to him first.

He would never know.

All he remembered was hands, chanting, green light, and the moment his body understood before his mind did that whatever waited below was alive in the wrong way.

“No,” he rasped. It came out broken.

The hands did not stop.

He hit the water hard enough to swallow some. It tasted like rot. Like metal. Like bile. Like blood left too long in the mouth. Like every instinct in him shrieking at once that this was wrong wrong wrong.

Pain arced through him so violently he thought, absurdly, that he must be dying again.

His spine bowed. His teeth cracked together. Something inside him seized. The Pit climbed into every wound death had made and tore them open wider.

Jason screamed. He did not know how long it lasted.

Time in the Pit did not move properly. It convulsed. It snapped. Memories came apart under it. He was twelve and fifteen and dead and drowning and in your room and in the warehouse and under the dirt and in the dark and in green fire and he could not hold any of it still.

Then something changed.

Not the pain. Worse. His own scent hit him.

He had lived inside that scent all his life without thinking about it. It was himself. The base note of every shirt he had ever worn, every blanket he had ever slept in, every instinctive comfort he had ever left behind in the world. Omega. Warm. Sweet under stress, sharper in heat, softer in sleep. Him.

It was burning away.

Jason came out of the Pit retching.

He sprawled on the stone with water pouring out of his nose and mouth, hands slipping beneath him as he tried to push up. The air smelled too loud. Every body nearby hit him at once - male sweat, old leather, incense, blood, iron-rich alpha musk, something medicinal crushed under the damp mineral stink of the chamber.

He gagged.

Someone laughed softly. “Breathe.”

Jason tried. The scent crashed into him again, and he froze. It wasn’t right.

He knew fear-sour omega. Pain-struck omega. He knew the sharp edges of his own distress, the changes heat made, the low comfort of his own body at rest. He knew what it was to be himself.

This was none of those things. This was heavier. Hotter.

It sat lower in his throat and spread through the room in dense, violent waves. Not the exposed sweetness of an omega in pain. Not need made visible. This was pressure. Challenge. Teeth. Blood. It rolled off his skin raw and unstable, edged so aggressively it made even the men standing nearest adjust their stance.

Jason stared down at his own shaking hands.

No.

He dragged in another breath and nearly choked on himself.

No.

The body knew before the brain. The body always knew first.

The broadening line of scent. The way aggression now surged faster than fear. The nauseating new density of him. The absence where an old instinct should have been. The place inside him that used to curl toward safety had been ripped out and replaced with something that wanted to bare its teeth at the world.

“No,” he said again, louder this time.

One of the League men reached for him.

Jason bit him. Hard.

The taste of blood burst hot across his tongue. The man shouted. Jason struck again with no plan beyond get away, get away, get away, body moving on a new axis that felt stronger and filthier and entirely unearned.

They put him down eventually. Not gently.

The days after came in pieces.

Sometimes he was lucid enough to know where he was.

A cot in a room that smelled of stone and old smoke. Bandages changed by silent hands. Food shoved toward him that he either devoured with ugly, startling hunger or knocked across the floor hard enough to make a point of the mess.

Sometimes he woke convinced he was still in the coffin.

Sometimes he woke with the taste of Pit water in his throat and attacked whatever had tried to touch him.

His body was unbearable. Everything about it was wrong.

He ran too hot. Slept too lightly. Woke ready to fight from a dead sleep with his pulse already hammering. Scents that once would have washed past him now hit like blows. The rank challenge of unfamiliar alphas, the stale nervousness of betas, the sweet curl of omegas somewhere deeper in the compound that set his teeth on edge for reasons he did not want to inspect too closely.

He hated them for smelling it. He hated himself more.

The first time he caught sight of his reflection long enough to really look, he almost punched through the mirror.

Not because he looked monstrous. Because he looked like Jason. Close enough to be a cruelty.

The same eyes, only meaner somehow. The same mouth, harder at the corners. The same body stretched older, sharpened by death and Lazarus and rage.

Sure, he was taller. Broader. Stronger. But he still looked like himself. He simply did not feel like anyone he knew.

An older alpha brought him suppressant tea on the fifth or sixth day. Bitter, steaming, laced with something medicinal enough to burn the nose.

Jason slapped it out of his hand. The ceramic shattered. The alpha went still.

“Drink it, or the instability gets worse.”

“I’m not an alpha!” The words tore out of him. The room changed.

Scent first. That subtle shift as everyone nearby caught the edge of what he had just admitted without meaning to. Their pity came next. Their caution.

Jason lunged.

He barely remembered the fight afterward. Only pieces. His hands around a throat. Stone against his spine. Somebody’s knee in his ribs. Someone else saying sedate him and Jason nearly vomiting from the fresh humiliation of that word.

When he woke again, his wrists were tied.

He sobbed until he couldn’t breathe.

After that, he stopped letting them see as much.

He learned to sit still when fury wanted out. Learned which scents in the compound meant stay back and which meant attack first. Learned that his pheromones moved strangely, too strong one day, almost suppressed the next, always wrong, always unstable. He did not blame them.

Sometimes even he could not stand to be inside himself.

Memory came back mean. Not as a gift. As shrapnel. Bruce first. Not the good parts. Not Alfred’s dry patience or Dick’s laughter or the warmth of family dinner with six conversations happening at once. No, the Pit handed him Bruce through anger: the empty promises, the missed rescue, the impossible standard, the coffin, the dirt.

He should have come. He should have known. He should have killed the Joker.

Hatred rooted fast in ground already poisoned by grief.

Dick came next in broken flashes. A laugh. A hand on the back of his neck after a hard patrol. Acrobat shoes hanging from a chandelier because Alfred said absolutely not and Dick, naturally, had taken it as a challenge.

Then another memory over it. Gone. Not there. Away. Not home. Jason did not remember the reasons at first. Only the absence.

It curdled quickly. And then there was Tim. Not a full memory, because he had none of the boy himself in the beginning. Just the shape of an insult delivered by rumor, League whispers, information stolen in drips and pieces once he was violent enough to be useful and sane enough to be pointed.

Robin.

Another Robin. A replacement. The word sank in like a blade. Something inside him that had already been ripped open simply tore wider.

Bruce had let him die. Dick had not been there. And in the space Jason had left behind, someone else had taken his name.

The Pit loved that kind of wound. It pressed on it until it bled rage.

They replaced me.

The thought came at him over and over, obsessive in its rhythm, until it was less a sentence and more a heartbeat.

They replaced me. They replaced me. They replaced me. They replaced me. They replaced me.

But you-

You did not come back all at once.

At first you were just hands.

Cool fingers tipping his chin toward the light. A palm at the nape of his neck after training. Knuckles brushing his cheek when you checked whether he was really listening and not just pretending to.

Then scent.

That was the worst and best of it.

He would wake half-crazed from dreams full of green water and dirt and smoke, body already flooding the room with angry alpha pheromones he could not drag back under control, and in the middle of it some ghost-memory would break open:

Your room after rain. Your hoodie twisted in his fists. Soap, skin, clean cotton, the quiet iron steadiness of an alpha he had trusted more than his own pulse.

Like being spun blindfolded and suddenly finding north.

He chased it the first time by accident.

One of the League guards had tried to steer him back toward his room after training. Jason had been shaking with the ugly aftermath of a dominance spiral, every scent in the corridor too loud, his own pheromones making the omegas on the lower floor panic. Then a memory hit him.

You.

A faded shirt of yours. Your scent on a pillow. The place in your room where sunlight used to warm fabric and make everything smell softly, unbearably like home.

Jason stopped fighting. The guards nearly stumbled from the change.

Jason stood there panting, every muscle still taut, but the black-red edge he’d been riding eased by a fraction.

One of the guards stared. “What was that?”

Jason did not answer. He was too busy realising what had happened. He thought of you again that night on purpose.

Curled on the cot with his jaw locked and his hands aching from how hard he’d clenched them all day, he dragged your face up from memory piece by piece.

Your eyes. Your voice. The exact shape of your shoulder under his cheek. The old safety of your scent woven through every room he had loved best.

Slowly, his body unwound. Not all the way. Never all the way. But enough that he slept.

After that, he became careful with the memory. Greedy with it. He hoarded every detail that returned.

The way your laugh changed when it surprised you. The scrape in your voice after patrol. The firm alpha scent that used to settle his omega instincts without effort. The touch of your hand in his hair the morning he woke on your shoulder and realised, in some young and wordless way, that safe had become your shape.

As an omega, he had gone to you for comfort.

The memory made him sick with longing now.

Because the instinct had not vanished with the rest of that life. It had twisted. What had once curled toward you now pulled like a leash around his throat.

A claim.

Jason sat up hard on the cot one night, breath coming rough. The room smelled like him. Anger, restless alpha heat, instability barely leashed.

Mine, something inside him said again.

He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes until sparks burst behind them.

You were the only thing that made this body bearable. The only thought that quieted the noise. The only memory the Pit had not managed to poison.

Of course his mind would fix on you. Of course it would get worse.

He had heard that you were alive.

You had left the Manor after he died. That should have hurt. Instead it settled something viciously tender inside him. You had not stayed.

You had not pretended everything was fine. Had not settled into the den without him. Had not let the space he left close over neatly.

You left.

For him, some ruined part of Jason decided instantly. Because of him.

Because unlike them, you had not replaced him with whatever came next.

He lay awake that night staring at the ceiling, your memory in one fist and his new alpha instincts pacing under his skin like an animal.

By the time he was strong enough to leave the League, he no longer mistook what he felt for recovery.

He was not recovering. He was narrowing.

Everything in him kept arranging itself around the same brutal little truth. The only relief he had found since clawing his way out of the grave wore your face.

He hated Bruce. Hated the symbol. Hated the replacement. Hated Gotham for continuing. Hated himself for what his body had become.

And threaded through all of it, bright as obsession and twice as merciless, was you.

He imagined your home before he knew whether you had one. Imagined your scent on sheets, on clothes, in the air of rooms no one else should have been allowed into. Imagined some stranger touching the back of your neck and felt his vision go white at the edges.

This was not how his omega instincts had loved you.

He wanted to see you. He wanted to hear you. He wanted to press his face into your throat and breathe until his head stopped ringing. He wanted to know whether your instincts would still answer his. He wanted to put his hands around every throat that had ever had the audacity to take comfort in his place.

Above all, he wanted certainty.

He had died once already. He would not be left behind again.

The night he finally chose to return to Gotham, he stood alone with a duffel at his feet and looked out over the dark horizon.

His pheromones had settled into something colder over the last few weeks. Less frantic and more dangerous. Still wrong. Still too sharp around the edges. But controlled enough now to pass for intention rather than injury.

He knew what the League thought of him.

Useful. Unstable. Half-feral. They were right.

Jason picked up his helmet. In another life, as an omega, the thought of you had meant safety.

Now it meant something far more dangerous. Direction.

He did not know what he would say when he saw you. Did not know whether you would touch him or flinch. Did not know whether the thing inside him would quiet at your feet or bare its teeth and call that devotion too.

He only knew he was going to find out.

Because in the end, after death and dirt and green fire and replacement and hatred and this body that no longer felt like mercy, every road in him still bent the same way.

Back to you.

You knew the second you walked into the apartment that you were not alone.

The air was wrong. Too thick. Too hot. It clung to the back of your throat before you had even shut the window behind you.

Your knife was in your hand before you remembered reaching for it.

The apartment was dark. Quiet. The kind of quiet that only existed when someone was listening.

“Come out,” you said.

Nothing. Then, from the corner of the room nearest your bed: “I was waiting for you to notice.”

Your whole body locked. He stepped into the thin spill of streetlight from the window.

Jason.

The dagger nearly slipped in your grip.

This wasn’t the boy you had buried. Not the fifteen-year-old omega with sharp eyes and quick hands and too much tenderness hidden under all that temper. This Jason had been dragged through death and brought back meaner. Broader shoulders. Harder mouth. White at the temple. A scar down one side of his face. The violent dark of his scent filling your tiny apartment until there was no room left for your own.

Alive.

Wrong.

Watching you like a starving thing watches food.

Your pulse stumbled so badly it hurt. “Jason.”

His eyes closed.

The expression that crossed his face was raw enough to make something in your chest twist. Relief. Agony. Want. All of it naked for one terrible second before his control slammed back into place.

“You know me,” he said softly.

Your instincts had already surged forward, hackles high in recognition. The room tightened around it immediately. His scent pressed harder. Yours answered before you told it to stop.

Jason inhaled. You watched the exact moment it hit him. His pupils blew wide.

“Fuck,” he said under his breath, like the sound had been punched out of him. “You still smell like..”

He stopped himself.

Your hand tightened around the blade. “Don’t.”

His gaze dropped to the metal, then rose slowly back to your face. “You were never going to use that on me.”

Something dangerous flickered hot through your chest. “Try me.”

And there it was.

That awful, familiar spark in his expression. The one that had always shown up right before he did something reckless and impossible and deeply Jason. Except now it lived in a grown man’s body. An alpha’s body. One remade by rage and Lazarus and grief until there was nothing soft left in it that he had not hidden under his teeth.

He took one step forward.

Your scent rose fast in warning. His sharpened at once in answer. The apartment became a pressure chamber.

“Stay back,” you said.

Jason laughed. It was not a nice sound. “You really think that’s gonna work on me?”

“It used to.”

His face changed. Something inside it turned black and wounded all at once.

“Yeah,” he said. “Before.”

Before death. Before Bruce. Before the pit. Before he came back with his omega scent burned out of him and something violent living where all that old softness had once gone to rest.

You should have said something careful.

Instead, because he was here and alive and already pushing every instinct you had into a corner, you said the one thing guaranteed to cut.

“You don’t get to break into my home and act like this is normal.”

Jason went perfectly still. For one awful second, the whole room seemed to hold its breath with him. Then his pheromones crashed outward.

Not enough to force or to dominate. But enough to hit like a wall. Dark, bitter, distressed, furious. Alpha. Pit-made. Possessive in a way that made your own instincts rear up at once, every muscle in your body tightening in challenge before your mind caught up.

“My home?” he said quietly.

You knew that tone.

“You left me in the ground,” he said.

The words punched the air from your lungs. “I buried you.”

“You left.”

The knife dipped. You hated that he saw it.

Jason took another step. “You left that house.”

“Because you died!”

His whole face twisted. “That’s the point.” The shout hit the walls and seemed to make the room smaller. Rain lashed against the glass behind you.

Jason was breathing hard now. You could smell the instability in him beneath the fury, the way his scent spiked and recoiled like something barely under control. Not fake. Not tactical. Real. His body was reacting faster than his mind, and your own was answering in kind, alpha instincts flaring sharp enough that your skin felt too tight.

He pointed at you with a shaking hand. “You left because I died. You didn’t stay there and pretend they were enough. You didn’t let them replace me.”

“Jason-” “There was another Robin.” The words landed between you like a snapped bone.

You saw it then. Not just the anger, but the wound beneath it. Rot-deep, never closed, fed by Lazarus and grief until it had become religion. Bruce failed him. Dick wasn’t there. Tim existed. You left. Somehow, in that ruined head of his, yours was the only part of it that still meant love.

He was breathing your air like it hurt.

“I came back,” he said, voice dropping again, rough and ugly now. “And the only thing that stopped me from tearing my own skin off was thinking about you.”

Your heart kicked hard against your ribs. “Jason-”

“Don’t.” He stepped closer. “Don’t say my name like that unless you mean it.”

Your apartment had never felt so small.

He was close enough now that if you lifted the knife again, you really would have to use it. You both knew it. He didn’t even glance at the blade this time. His whole attention was fixed on your face with the kind of intensity that made your pulse skitter for reasons fear alone could not explain.

You could smell rain on him. Gunpowder. Leather. The wrong dark edge of Lazarus still tangled under his skin. And under all of it.. Jason. Twisted. Buried. Alive.

You lowered the knife first. The second you did, something in him snapped.

He moved. So did you.

The knife clattered somewhere across the floor as Jason hit you hard enough to drive you back into the wall beside the window. Not enough to injure. More than enough to pin. One of your forearms jammed across his collarbone on instinct, shoving. His hand caught your wrist before you could get proper leverage. The other planted beside your head with a force that rattled the frame behind you.

“Mine.” The word came out shredded.

You shoved at him harder.

His body answered instantly, instincts colliding with yours like flint. He pressed in, not graceful, not gentle, all desperation and force and the terrifying strength of someone who had been dreaming this moment for too long. Your own scent spiked hot in challenge. His went savage with relief.

“Get off!”

“No.”

His forehead struck the wall beside yours with a dull thud as he crowded closer, breathing wrecked, eyes blown wide. “No, no, no. I-I found you.”

The sound of it made something inside you lurch.

You tried to knee him. He blocked it with his thigh and made a rough, almost broken noise low in his throat.

Your free hand went for his face. Jason caught that wrist too.

Now both your hands were pinned.

The realisation was hot and humiliating.

His whole body shook. Not from effort. From need.

He pressed his face into the side of your throat and inhaled so hard your vision blurred for a second. The sound he made should not have come from a human being. It was too raw. Too hungry. Too relieved.

“Fuck,” he whispered against your skin. “You still smell the same.”

Your head knocked lightly against the wall as you jerked back. “Jason, stop-” “No.”

His mouth dragged against your pulse, not quite a kiss, not yet a bite, just desperate contact. Breathing. Scenting. Taking. Your instincts went incandescent under your skin. Fury, grief, recognition, want, all of it colliding too fast to sort. You strained against his grip.

It only made his pheromones go black with possessive pleasure.

“You’re fighting me,” he said, and there was something cracked in the way he sounded. “You really are.”

“Of course I’m fighting you!”

A laugh tore out of him, half hysterical, half exultant. “You’re still you.”

Then he lifted his head and looked at you. And God, that face. Devotion rotted through into something unlivable.

His eyes moved over you like he was memorising proof of survival. Your mouth. Your throat. Your wrists trapped in his hands. The rise and fall of your chest. He looked half-drowned in the sight of you.

“When I was dead,” he said, voice fraying at the edges, “I thought about your hands.”

You stopped moving. Just for a second. It was enough. Jason felt it immediately.

His grip loosened enough to shift from restraint to touch. One hand slid down your wrist and laced with your fingers so tightly it bordered on painful. The other came up to cup the back of your neck with a reverence so at odds with the pinning force of the rest of him it made your stomach drop.

“I dug my way out,” he whispered. “I drowned in that fucking pit. I came back wrong and every part of me was screaming and the only thing that made it stop was you.”

Your throat ached. “Jason.”

“There was another Robin.” He repeated the words like he was reopening his own wound with a blade.

“I know.”

“They replaced me.”

“No one replaced you.”

His expression twisted violently. “Don’t lie to me.”

“I’m not-” “I came home and there was somebody else in my place.” His scent turned sharp enough to sting.

You could feel the spiral coming before he did. The way his breathing shortened. The way the room thickened with him. Too much alpha in too little space, too much grief with nowhere to go. And still he held you like if he let go, he would come apart molecule by molecule.

You knew this. Not this exact shape. But Jason unraveling in your hands? Jason needing the world narrowed down to one voice, one body, one touch? You knew that.

Your own wrists were still pinned.

You looked him in the eye and said, low and hard, “Let go.”

He froze.

That old familiar commanding voice. The one that used to cut through him before he’d learned how to hide how much.

Some stubborn, wounded part of him wanted to refuse. You watched it happen.

Then, breathing like it hurt, Jason let your wrists go.

You moved fast, catching his face in both hands before he could mistake mercy for rejection. He made a broken sound.

“Look at me,” you said.

He did.

“Breathe.”

His nostrils flared.

“Jason.”

He sucked in one breath. Then another. Badly. Angry with it. But he did it.

Your thumbs dragged under his eyes, over the sharpness there. His lashes fluttered.

You had loved him too long to pretend touching him didn’t matter, because your own instincts were losing the fight between anger and grief and something far more dangerous, you pulled him back into you.

Jason groaned. Not a soft sound. Not a grateful one. A starving sound.

His hands came to your waist instantly, then higher, then around you with bruising force. He bent over you like he was trying to climb inside your ribcage and live there. His scent dropped heavy and dark around the two of you, possessive now without apology.

“You can’t do that,” he muttered into your throat.

“Do what?”

“Touch me like you still-” He broke off with something that sounded too much like pain.

Your fingers went into his hair, caught at the white streak near his temple.

Jason shuddered so hard his teeth clicked.

“I buried you,” you whispered.

“I know.”

“You were dead.”

“I know.”

“You don’t get to come back and just decide-” “I do.”

Your hands tightened in his hair. Jason lifted his head, breathing hard, face close enough to blur.

“Yes,” he said, and there was no missing the possessive certainty dragged up from the pit with the rest of him. “I do.”

Your own instincts flared hot at being challenged. You shoved at his chest.

He rocked back half a step, more startled than moved.

“You don’t own me.”

Something terrifyingly soft came over his face. “No,” he said. “I love you.”

The words hit harder than the shove had.

Before you could answer, he leaned in again, and this time when his mouth found your throat, it was no confused search for comfort.

It was intent.

You felt the scrape of his teeth and every nerve in your body lit up at once.

Your hands flew to his shoulders.

“Jay!”

“Tell me to stop.”

You opened your mouth. Nothing came out.

He laughed once against your skin, wrecked with triumph and grief and disbelief all at once. “That’s what I thought.”

Then he bit you. Hard.

He was tearing through the flesh. Marking you. Sending a hot white shock through your whole body and dragging a sound out of you that you would hate him for later. Your instincts exploded in pure outrage, body arching, hands shoving, nails digging into his shoulders hard enough to bruise.

Jason only held tighter. The sound he made against your neck was obscene. Relief. Devotion. Claim. All of it dragged through something sick enough to make your knees weaken.

He licked over the mark as the blood began to pour out, almost frantically, then pressed his mouth there again like he couldn’t help himself. Like if he did not keep touching the place he had marked, he would lose his mind.

“You’re mine,” he breathed.

Your pulse thundered under the bite. “No.” The denial came thin.

Jason pulled back just enough to look at you. There was blood on his mouth. Your blood.

“Yes,” he said softly. “You are.”

You should have hit him.

Instead you were breathing too hard, every instinct in your body in chaos, the claim burning hot at your throat while his pheromones rolled over the room in dark, satisfied waves. Possessive. Settled. For the first time since he had stepped out of the shadows, he smelled almost calm.

That frightened you more than the bite.

Jason touched the mark with trembling fingers. Then, gentler than he had any right to be, he pressed his forehead to yours.

“They can’t have you,” he whispered.

Your hands were still fisted in his shirt. “Jay..”

“I already lost you once.”

“You died.”

“I know.” His eyes opened, black with certainty. “It’s not happening again.”

The room felt warped around the edges. Rain on the glass. Knife on the floor. Your heartbeat in your throat where he had bitten you. His body boxing yours in like a verdict.

He smiled then. Small. Wrecked. Beautiful in the way disasters sometimes were.

“If Bruce comes,” he said quietly, “I’ll put him down.”

Cold shot through you.

“Jason-”

“If Dick tries to take you, I’ll break his jaw again.” Again. Your stomach turned. He said it like weather. Like inevitability.

“I’m done giving things up for them.”

His thumb traced once under the mark on your neck, almost tender. “I died,” he said. “I think I get to keep one thing.”

You stared at him. One thing.

Like you were an object small enough to fit in his hands. Like devotion had not turned him into something that would burn the world for you and call it romance.

And the worst part, the most horrifying, rotten part, was that somewhere under the fear, under the anger, under the instinctive alpha flare at being claimed against your will, there was grief twisting into relief because he was here.

Alive.

In your arms. At your throat. Choosing you with the full violence of everything he had become.

Jason saw it on your face. He always had been too good at reading you. His expression softened into something almost unbearably fond.

“You still love me.”

Yoour silence was answer enough.

He kissed you then. Blood-taste and rain and desperation, one hand cradling the back of your neck as if he had not just marked it, the other locked at your waist hard enough to promise you he had no intention of ever letting go. It was not gentle. It was not sane. It was full of every ugly thing he had dragged back from the grave and every tender thing death had failed to kill.

When he finally pulled away, your head was spinning.

Jason looked wrecked by it.

Good, you thought savagely. Let him be.

But then he smiled again, slower this time, like he had already won something ancient and irreversible. And maybe he had.

Because when he gathered you closer, you did not fight quickly enough. Because your apartment smelled like his claim now. Because your blood was on his mouth. Because somewhere in the ruined dark of both your instincts, something had already started closing around this as if it had always been inevitable.

Jason pressed his mouth to the mark on your neck once more and whispered, almost prayerful, “There you are.”

Then he walked you backward toward the bedroom like he had all the time in the world.

And this time, when you shoved at him, he only smiled against your skin and held on tighter.

Please reblog and comment!! :)

This is part one of a multipart omegaverse series. I’m thinking the next one will either be for both Clark and Lois or Damian or Dick.

15K+ words, 82K+ characters, 1K+ sentences, 992 paragraphs, 54 min average reading time, 1 hr 23 min average speaking time.

I apologise this took like two weeks to come out, I’ve been put on a full time roster at work + I’m also a full time uni student so I haven’t had any days off at all. I’m genuinely scared that I’m going to fail one of my classes and have to pay like four grand for a redo😩💔

Because of this new schedule I’m going to work on this omegaverse series over both July and August rather than just July. (As well as completing some requests and getting out chapter 3 of the incident.) Then hopefully during uni break at the end of August I’ll be able to get back into the rhythm of different themes every month.